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I .... icated to running the estate in order to support Serebryakov's arid output-a waste about which Vanya is in no doubt. "I might shine, but I give no light," Vanya says. He goes on, "I can't sleep at night for the rage and hopelessness that wells up inside me-the stupidity of chucking away everything I could have had!" Despite Jacobi's otherwise expert at- tack, there is too much sheen on him, as if his vitality hadn't quite been sapped by a generation of rural drudge In the farce of Act III, however, his despair and ennui become inspired fury, when Sere- bryakov proposes that the estate be sold to underwrite his life in the cit)1. Here, just before he tries to shoot the pompous old baby, Jacobi goes into a tailspin of sidesplitting mocke ' is your disci- pline?-Welliet's talk about Art!-a subject on which you demonstrate, in every line you've ever written, the most pitifUl, laughab e, profound ignorance," he says, scintillating in his white heat. "My life's in ruins. I have no life! . . . So thanks very much, please accept my undying hatred!" At the end of the play; Chekhov's rus- ticated characters, like Beckett's tramps, can't go on and must go on. "We have to live our lives-that's all," Sonya says, giv- ing a filigree of faith to their life sentence of resignation. As she dreams out loud of angels and redemption, Vanya sits crying beside her. His tears are not for faith but for the absence of it. In this heartbreak- ing stage picture, Chekhov perfectly cap- tures the ambiguous equipoise of disillu- sion and hope which constitutes daily life. "Oh, this world of darkness," the nanny says, in the play's penultimate moment. "God forgive us. Forgive us all." Of the many achievements of this gorgeous production, perhaps the most memorable is not what's in the words but what's underneath them: the abiding grace of Chekhov's humanit)1. F or Americans who watch Sebastian Barry's poetic "Our Lady of Sligo" (at the Irish Repertory Theatre), much of the historical predicament of Barry's heroine, Mai O'Hara, a member of the Catholic bourgeoisie, which felt that it was robbed of its inheritance by the Sinn Fein revolution, is of almost no account. The dynamics of drama, not of Irish pol- itics, are what hold our attention, or don't. M'ai is a distressed alcoholic, who languishes with her memories and her monologues on a hospital deathbed in 1953. She is a roiling compendium of regret, an incarnation of personal and class disappointment-over her hate- filled, abusive marriage, her dead son, her lost prestige and promise. She is played by the dexterous Sinéad Cusack, whose voice orchestrates every word with great nuance and authority, but whose solid core is at odds with the ravaged, splintered personality of her character. It's only through the force of Max Stafford-Clark's production and of Barry's persuasive rhetoric that she as- sumes the hoary mantle of the forgotten Irish middle class to which she bears witness. "I need rescue," Mai says, and in her mouth speech becomes a kind of imperial assertion; she is, literally and figuratively, talking for histo But articulation can be its own stum- bling block. Mai is locked into an inner dialogue, and the characters in her story have no purchase on her waking life. "I was never married," she says as her hus- band and daughter stand at her bedside, in the play's first beats. She cannot see them; they cannot penetrate her. The stakes are thus lowered, and, inevitably, the weight of the drama falls on language rather than on behavior. Barry can make wonderfUl music with words, but no one can accuse him of being a minimalist. A head is not bald, it's a "continent of skin, an Australia of it"; Mai isn't startled awake but "pierced up out of. . . slumbers like a gannet surfacing through the salty power of the river tide." Every charac- ter that maneuvers around Mai's bed is there to discourse about rather than to dramatize her life. From her upwardly mobile husband, Jack (Jarlath Conroy), we hear of their privileged life in Mrica; from her daughter,Joanie (Melinda Page Hamilton), we learn of the family fights; from her father (Tom Lacy), we hear how in the garden Mai would name the color of the violets: "Blue, blue, blue. . . ." Barry is probably Ireland's finest liv- ing dramatist; his problem here is that his eloquence robs the barbarous mo- ments of their danger. Hate and dis- gust and despair are rendered elegant. Barry writes beautifully, all right, but, unlike Chekhov, he insists too strenu- ously on himself as a poet, rather than letting the poetry of stage characteriza- tion speak for him. .